To compile a modern dictionary that catalogues the words in currency, and to study linguistic patterns in the contemporary language, it is necessary to have a corpus of authentic texts that reflect current usage of the language. Although there are numerous Arabic corpora, none claims to be representative of the language in terms of the combination of geographical region, genre, subject matter, mode, and medium. This paper describes a 100-million-word corpus that takes the British National Corpus (BNC) as a model. The aim of the corpus is to be balanced, annotated, comprehensive, and representative of contemporary Arabic as written and spoken in Arab countries today. It will be different from most others in not being heavily-dominated by the news or in mixing the classical with the modern. In this paper is an outline of the methodology adopted for the design, construction, and annotation of this corpus. DIWAN (Al-Shargi and Rambow, 2015) was used to annotate a one-million-word snapshot of the corpus. DI-WAN is a dialectal word annotation tool, but we upgraded it by adding a new tag-set that is based on traditional Arabic grammar and by adding the roots and morphological patterns of nouns and verbs. Moreover, the corpus we constructed covers the major spoken varieties of Arabic.
This paper aims to analyze the use of cohesion in Arabic and English religious spoken texts. Twelve texts, delivered by some of the most eloquent Imams, were analyzed in light of the model proposed by Halliday & Hasan (1976). The study reveals that lexical cohesion is the most dominant type of cohesion in Arabic religious discourse, whereas it is grammatical cohesion which dominates English religious discourse. Although both languages prefer the use of reference, conjunctions and lexical repetition, Arabic uses lexical repetition, collocation and personal pronouns more often than English. A major contribution of the present study is that it captures new cohesive devises employed in Arabic religious discourse other than proposed by Halliday & Hasan (1976): rhyming patterns and parallelism.
The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the argumentative compositions written by EFL learners at two academic stages (sophomores and seniors) majoring in English at the Hashemite University, Jordan. The significance of this study springs from its focus on the use of DMs in Jordanian EFL learners’ argumentative writings. Employing an integrated research method of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the findings revealed that both groups of participants used the same types of DMs with varying degree of frequency, namely, elaborative, contrastive, reason, inferential, conclusive, and exemplifier DMs, respectively. The sophomores were observed to employ a relatively higher number of DMs compared to the seniors, which may be ascribed to some redundant instances of DMs. The elaborative, contrastive, and reason types were the most widely used, while inferentials, conclusives and exemplifiers appeared infrequently in both groups. The analysis of individual DMs displayed that the DMs ‘and’, ‘because’, and ‘but’ were the predominant across the seniors and sophomores’ argumentative texts. This overuse of these DMs may be due to the influence of L1 of the participants and the popularity of these DMs among students and teachers of English. Additionally, the participants showed a low proficiency in using DMs since they overused largely a restricted variety of DMs at the expense of others that would be expected in the argumentative writing; some DMs were noticed either to be underused or absent. The results of Pearson’s r correlation test indicated that there was a weak positive but significant correlation between the writing quality and the use of DMs. This may be taken as a predictor of the writing quality in argumentative compositions by EFL. Pedagogically, the study emphasizes the significance of teaching DMs, where EFL learners should be taught how to use them appropriately to avoid any transference of their L1. Further research on DMs in argumentative writings in different levels of proficiency is recommended.
This study examines the major phonological features of Jordanian Druze Arabic (JD). Druze are a minority group in the east part of Jordan. Their dialect has not been investigated before. First, we give a brief history of the socio-cultural background of the Druze. Then we investigate selected melodic and prosodic processes to be reported for this dialect: including syllable structure, assimilation (definite article assimilation, sonorant assimilation, non-coronal assimilation), emphasis spread, syncope, resolution, umlaut, and raising. Druze use these features most frequently. However, the raising process is the most dominant feature among them.
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